This is only for Part 1. I'll come back and write another for Part 2 after I watch it, but I REALLY need to vent.

First off, the art, animation, sound, and all that are all on-par for the day. There's nothing to complain about there.
Every problem I have with this OVA comes from watching it as an avid rally fan.

The story takes place in 1993, yet none of the cars featured are even close to being that new.
Before competing in the Safari Rally, Gen is forced to do a preliminary drive along a mountain road in France. The car he's given is a Peugeot 205 T16 E2, a car that was banned from competition after the 1986 season. While he's driving the 205, he comes up against a homologation model Lancia 037, which eventually goes over a cliff and explodes. That explosion is the ONLY accurate thing that happens in the entire episode (Lancias were always prone to catching fire).

Next up comes the Safari Rally itself. We have the team he's driving for, Seiou Corp., fielding a pair of Ford Sierra Cosworths, cars that were phased out of competition in the late 1980s by the onset of Group A regulations. What's better is Toyota Team Europe (a real team) is seen fielding MkIII Supras, which were never even used in rallying. They should've been running ST185 Celicas, but those didn't exist at the time the OVA was produced. The sensible thing to do would've been to draw what was being used at the time: the ST165 Celica.

Beyond these obvious flaws, the pacenote systems for each driver are borderline-incomprehensible as there's almost no consistency and the way the rally is presented leads me to believe the people who wrote this had never even seen a rally before. It's as if somebody who watched the Safari Rally on TV explained it to the producer and then he waited a month to explain it to everybody else.

I was all sorts of excited to see that a rally anime had been made and now I'm incredibly disappointed at the result. I can't say I have high hopes for Part 2.read more

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